I don’t know where to begin. Should I apologise for my inexcusable absence? Promise to do better on the return run? Quit before the next false start?

But who would I be convincing?

You, my beautiful readers, deserve more credit than that. So I’ll just make a list:

Things that have happened since I last blogged

I became Certified to Care, fell horribly sick, got a job caring for the aged in their own homes, fell horribly sick again, survived the winter and have now made it to almost a year in (not really) part-time employ.

Nor am I talking about writing, which will always be the end game, no matter the mirage that stretches in between the Me and It.

I’m talking about REAL WORLD stuff. And the need to live in it. To breathe and touch and listen to it. To be. 3D. Again.

Don’t you ever feel that? Like you’ve spent so long staring into a flat screen that you might any second turn into a flat person, whose beating heart has no where to go except up, and out, and bursting ’til you scream, and smash something, and run away and join a commune where the only technology is a hand held water pump and real life people for defibrillators.

Kickstart.

It’s ok. I’m not going to join a commune.

But I have completed a first aid course. And I have been studying to regain my humanity, in the form of a Certificate III in Aged Care.

In exactly four days (but whose counting?) I will be commencing a full time 120 hour placement in an Aged Care Facility, after which I will be licensed to kill claw back some of the feeling in my fingers and toes after a lifetime of sedentary labour.

Hell, what have I done?

Actually, the hardest part so far has been finding a pair of black, non-figure hugging pants with real, functional pockets. See! Even the fashions are trying to make us flat.

I don’t want to be a flat person.

I want to get my hands dirty. To know that what I am doing to survive is worth something to someone else. That it is real.

Just like these tomato plants, that burst out of my compost unannounced.

There will be a place for writing, I am sure of it. Once the Certificate is passed, a job and a routine is established.

A short term disruption for longer term gain. Survival. Stability. A sense of self worth. All necessary ingredients for a writer to write. And to mean it.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, 2015 is the year to Get Real. Who wants to join me? Go on, I dare you to 😉

Happy New Year, loyal bloggers. What’s your phrase for the year ahead?

On 17 September, after a nine month struggle with brain cancer, my mother’s twin sister slipped away from us. In many ways, she was like a second mother to my siblings and me. It’s been difficult to put into words the profound and unexpected impact of her loss, considering a year ago we were celebrating the twins 70th, unaware of what would come.

17 November 2014

Dear Aunty Barb,

It’s been two months since you left us. A week since I’ve been trying to write you my farewell.

There was so much I never had the chance to say to you.

You’re with me, in my kitchen, everyday.

The gifts you gave are more than they appear.

You’re the twist of lemonade in an ordinary drinking glass (you never did like plain old H2O).

You’re the kick of chilli in the curry powder tin (and I can hear your wicked cackle, now).

But it’s right that this is where your memory dwells.

You spent your life nourishing the family, and that extended out, to the community beyond.

You did it with a flair and an originality that was all your own – a fairy garden here, a hand crafted zombie pop-up there.

You always took such joy in the little details of our lives. Like my dream to write.

It was a doing kind of love you had. And I wish you knew how much that meant to us. To me.

But even as I say it, I know you knew, very well, the value of the things you did.

It was me who was slow to cotton on.

I was supposed to help you write down your memoirs. My deepest regret is never making time for that – I never did stay over like you hoped I would. The reasons why seem trivial, at best, now that you’re gone.

You left too soon.

You had your first sip of alcohol only after 60.

Age 69, you and your friends were out til 5am for New Year’s Eve, putting to shame the next generation who preferred to go to bed.

You loved spending time with us. It helped to keep you young, you said.

But your outlook always was more youthful than your age.

Which is why your departure, at 70, has come as such a shock.

In hindsight, all the signs were there. The refusal to participate. The angry depression. The impenetrable loneliness. The slips in memory.

As happens in this kind of work, the project scope was extended and mysteriously delayed until I gave up all hope of any kind of outcome and decided to get a job selling tickets to the footy.

In its well-timed sense of irony, the universe conspired to deliver the long awaited (and hence now URGENT) green light for the video completion in the same week that I started my indentured labour!

So commenced a month of craziness, followed by another couple of months of tying up loose ends.

Until the time has come to say goodbye for good.

To video as a source of income.

To more than six years of self employment during which I managed to feed myself (but only just).

To a creative occupation that, however meaningful, didn’t really leave room for the primary passion that is writing.

So what was all the fuss about?

Lort Smith Animal Hospital is the largest not-for-profit animal hospital in Australia. It was originally established to assist people of modest means in providing vet care for their animals (which included none other than hers truly and her merry menagerie).

Given its unique history in veterinary care and female philanthropy, the hospital was keen to record the stories of key people who have supported the hospital since the 1940’s.

The first stage was recording seventeen interviews, which are now part of a digital archive for the hospital.

The second was creating a short memoir on the history of Lort Smith.

At 11 minutes, the video is far from epic! But, with any luck, is enough to inspire people to want to get involved.

Now that the credits have rolled on video, the question remains whether selling footy tickets will motivate me into writing a best seller…

Of all the jobs you’ve ever had, what was the one you were happiest to leave?

Now, in case there’s any doubt, what I just said is plain and simply un-Ostralyin.

Way worse than not attending church.

If you don’t follow a footy team (go the Dogs!), then it’s pretty much social suicide. Which, when you work at home alone, is no big deal.

But when your job is taking bookings for manic footy fans?

I’ve been learning a whole new vocabulary.

“Freo” stands for Fremantle, “The Cats” are actually Geelong, the “Rabbitohs” are Souths (which, by the way, are Manly) and no, that’s not the AFL (Australian Football League), that’s NRL (National Rugby League) and never mind The Asian Cup (what the heck is soccer, anyway?).

I’ve learned what the centre line and the fence line are, but I’m still unsure about the wing. I have been winging it a lot, though. Which is what happens when you are looking at a map of a roughly square stadium with no compass or description as a guide.

It may also explain why some fans were booked seats with the opposing Cheersquad (oops!).

Until recently, I thought Home and Away was just a bad Aussie soapie. But apparently there are things called Home and Away teams, and which team is Home and which team is Away makes a difference as to where you sit.

And while we’re on the topic of vocabulary.

You know those words you only ever read, and never have to say out loud until you’re talking to a customer?

Previously on Go Wild. Quietly, you may have caught casual mention of a new part time job. As I have now officially been caught and tagged, all that wild action is momentarily reserved for learning new behaviours.

I’ve made it through my first four days of full time training and in ten hours time I’ll be killing it out on the phones!

Normal programming will resume one of these days, in the meantime, enjoy this intermission with one of Pepi’s favourite songs…

It immediately had me contemplating a new form of glass ceiling I’ve encountered in my quest for jobs and houses.

Part-time work is hard to come by. You know immediately when you see the words “Suits mother returning to work” that you’re doomed.

Wannabe writers need not apply

A person who writes mediocre blogs in their spare time simply can’t compete with the Queen Bees of the labour force.

And yet, I ask you, who’s the safer bet?

The woman whose thankless progeny are determined to make her late to work two days out of three, or the one who’s just figured out that at her current rate of pay she’ll be working till 105 to save for her retirement?

It’s no more logical than the ads for three bedroom rentals. “Perfect family home. Close to schools and transport…”

Like the only people in need of public transport are those who procreate.

Like two childless women don’t need an extra room to house their nephews, nieces and hordes of child popping relatives.

And just before you say it. I’m not childless because I dislike the snotty nosed!

(Did you know this is an actual book?)

I love children. And that is why I’m childless. (I make a way better Aunt than I ever would a mum. Just ask Pepi.)

But I wonder why, fifty years on from the sexual revolution, this is still a choice we need to justify?

Imagine sitting at your cubicle at work, your tummy just about to grumble for its midday meal, and in rolls lunch.

A tiffin of two or three different curries, a chapatti and some rice.

You open up the insulated carry bag just to get a whiff, and OMG…

Hungry yet?

This hunger is really the premise behind “The Lunchbox”, a movie Ms and I saw on a desperate, mid-winter whim the other night.

Set in the heady bustle of Mumbai, it’s a story about Saajan, a lonely widowed accountant on the brink of retirement, and the misplaced tiffin of Ila, a neglected young wife.

The food is cooked with love, and delivered to the wrong man with the right appreciation for the cook’s craft.

A conversation begins through a series of illicit hand written notes, passed back and forth in the tiffin, courtesy of the dabbawallahs’ flawless delivery system (as declared by Harvard University).

From the moment Saajan encounters the first note, we are transported to our childhood – to the days before iPhones and email, when kids wrote notes and traded sandwiches.

Everything about this movie is real. The noise, dirt, sweat. The claustrophobia. The smell of yellowed office files, hot curry and cigarette smoke. The graininess of analogue video and romance of handwritten notes.

Looking at the overcrowded transport, there’s the sense of a city under strain. Development misplaced. Out of context. Fucked up in a million different ways.

And that is part of the reason the film has a universal resonance.

When Ila shares her dream of escaping to Bhutan, where the value of one rupee becomes five and the only GDP is “Gross Domestic Happiness”, we understand.

We’ve all been there. Longing for a simplicity lost to the world as we know it.

A world constantly filtered through a digital interface that screams for our attention, day and night.

While most of us manage some kind of escape – a tree change, a sea change or a holiday to Bali, for Ila and Saajan, there is no escape.

Except through food.

The poetry infused in Ila’s cooking comes alive in Saajan’s writing, as the very act of taste reignites his joie de vivre.

There’s a moment in the film where we hear the voiceover of Saajan as he writes to Ila. We see him standing on his balcony, drawing on a cigarette and Ila, pouring herself a cup of masala tea, as she sits to ponder on his note.

Right in that moment, there is nothing else in the world except two people connected by a single piece of paper, and the freedom to reflect.

It made me want to throw out my computer and write, the way I used to.

Uncensored and unencumbered. With a piece of paper and a pen. No thoughts. Just a feeling bleeding on the page.

A real page.

I’m heartened by that thought, as I am by the number of requests I’ve had these past two weeks for hard copies of the Hello Pepi books.

It’s a 3D world that tugs at us, reminding us that we are more than just a hologram.

We crave touch. And taste. And smell.

The kind we don’t even know we’re missing until we feel it, once again. We are alive!

There’s an oft repeated line in the film that goes:

Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right station.”

Maybe books aren’t dead. Maybe it’s time to go and find a publisher.

And so the journey carries on… 🙂

When was the last time you tasted something so divine, the world stopped spinning?